The name of 2paperdolls comes via the five-year-old brain of the daughter of its chief executive Louis Ravenet, who surely qualifies for the title of "serial entrepreneur": together with Andrea, his wife, and Steve McLelland, the chief technology officer, he has been creating (and, usually, selling) companies for about 20 years. One of his startups was sold to Microsoft and became what is now known as Microsoft CRM, but his focus now is on games that don't seem to be games - such as the ReCaptcha project created by Luis von Ahn, in which humans filling in a CAPTCHA are also contributing to the computer-aided scanning of old printed books and articles.

The company itself is only a few months old, but Ravenet is insistent that Dublin is the place he wants the company to be – "we've looked at all sorts of countries, we've lived in Paris and Amsterdam" – and that it is hiding its expertise in online gaming under a bushel. Among the games Ravenet is developing is one called "Charity Ball", to raise awareness of cystic fibrosis by a combination of teamwork, locatlon-based checkins, vouchers linked to restaurants, and information about the disease.

He also thinks that we don't use the best computers in the world – the human brain – quite enough to tackle online problems, relying instead on brute horsepower instead of the subtle capabilities of our neurons...

• What's your pitch? "We create social games with the purpose of accomplishing work while people are having fun. Luis von Ahn is our deity – 200m people use ReCaptcha to metatag data every day. Games get used for everything from protein identification to spotting solar flares."

• What makes your business or product unique? "We've been working together for 20 years, and we've created and sold a lot of technology companies."

• What's your background? "We built the Microsoft CRM – the division that acquired us merged with Great Plains. We were turning providing computer support for customers into a game. That was 2002. We were based in Washington DC when Microsoft bought us, so we went to Redmond, then we made it back over the wall and out after [an earn-out period of] three years. We were used to working in a small group of about 30 people. We've sold stuff to Raytheon, we've done top secret software development work for the Pentagon. We're library experts, so we've built software libraries for the NSA and the Los Angeles Times." [I haven't yet been able to independently verify the claims about Raytheon or the NSA - CA.]

"We moved to Europe after spending a year sailing around the world. We were living in Paris. Some of the possibilities in games excited us. Take [the infectious bacterium] MRSA. Hospitals are spending millions trying to get people and especially doctors to scrub properly, but they couldn't get people to wash their hands as often as they needed to. We turned it into a game with a handprint, and all of a sudden we got senior surgeons who wouldn't before taking real care to clean their hands."

• What's your biggest achievement? "Realising that instead of having a complete set of specialisms before starting development, that the problem is so new that we can plan it as we go along. So we have developed a platform which incorporates what we have learnt so far. We think that a game might have a three- to six-month lifespan, and then where do we go from here? We developed it to solve that problem. So we can use an idea to teach people in China about the health risks of using communal chopsticks, for example."

• What's your biggest challenge? "Pulling the talent together. It takes a special type of individual to buy into a startup that isn't looking to just flip itself to the first buyer that comes along. Look at Facebook and Zynga – they've got individuals who understand that this is a long-term business plan."

• What's the most important web tool that you use each day? "Google Docs, Gmail."

• Name your closest competitors? "Anything Louis Anh is doing is our closest competitor. He's doing things that are intuitive for people to do. It's the whole Google model, of getting people to tell us what matters and what doesn't, rather than relying on complex algorithms and indexing. Our plan is to start knowledge games so that we can take tasks that are insanely complex for machines and make non-tasks by giving them to humans to do in a way that people enjoy doing. It's the really complex things that you need done, the sensory information, that computers have such problems with. We don't get insight through linear processing [by computers]. We need to step ourside the implied solutions."

• What's an example of a "non-game game"? "Google Images has something where you get users to enter more information about an image: first you get an image of a flower and you enter some detail about it – it's a flower – and then some more – it's a tulip – and then some more - it's a Dutch tulip. Google is getting an amazing amount of knowledge through this."

• Where do you want the company to be in five years? In Ireland, with 155 employees and 75m users.

• Sell to Google, or be bigger than Google?Louis: "We've said we aren't going to get acquired." Andrea: "I think it's the void [of a new business] that they find inspiring."

• Should the tax loopholes that allow dodges like the double Irish and the Dutch sandwich be closed?Louis: "As someone who has written multimillion tax cheques to government.. they shouldn't touch the corporate tax rate. But I think that where loopholes are abusive, they should be closed. A company like Google which is worth $200bn should pay their bills."

"The prime minister has rightly called this a 'line in the sand' and makes a convincing argument that favorable tax structure is directly responsible for €250m in tax revenues collected this year — revenue completely due to the low-tax's ability to attract major industry layers such as Dell, IBM, Facebook, Zynga, Google, Microsoft, etc.. For this revenue alone, the Irish government is committed to maintaining their low tax status."